MOST POPULAR FEATURESTop 50 Pokémon of All Time
Can you believe there are now six generations of Pokémon? Six!! That's a crazy amount of different creatures to collect. But which are the cream of the crop? Don't worry, Magikarp isn't actually one of them.

I am a PS3 owner and someday hope to be a PS4 owner, yet I am not at all dissatisfied with my choice to delay purchase, solely based on the current PS4 library. When I transitioned from a Playstation 1 to a Playstation 2, I was pleasantly surprised that I could for the most part rid myself of my PS1...

A Seventh of its Potential

When I first saw Seven Kingdoms, I was excited by its potential. Here
was a real-time strategy game that reminded me both of Warcraft
II and Civilization. It promised the ability to control research, diplomacy,
espionage, production, racial tension, and trade, while providing an exciting
and diverse real- time battle. All the ingredients for an excellent game were
there, the only thing that was yet to be seen was if the designers could pull
it all together into something fun to play.

It seems that in trying to make all the elements of a game like
Seven Kingdoms fit together, some compromises had to be
made. The first thing I noticed was that although there were
trees, they had no bearing on the game at all. There is no
sending lumberjacks to the forests to get wood for construction;
the trees just were for decoration, nothing else. I next noticed
that there are only 9 types of buildings. A
town generally consists of a town center, which is little more
than a repository for peasants, a fort, a mine, factory, and
marketplace.

The fort, which is the most important type of building in a real-
time strategy game, can produce only one type of soldier. If you
want to have any sort of combined-arms, you'll need to build a
war-factory, which can produce up to five types of war machines.
One problem with the war factory is that it takes far too long to
construct a war machine, which is not overwhelmingly superior to
a well-trained soldier. I'd estimate that it takes several times
as long to build a cannon as it takes to build a war-factory in
the first place.

By now, you might be wondering
what assets does Seven Kingdoms have. The answer, dear reader, is supernatural
beings and espionage. Unlike Warcraft
II, in which supernatural beings were summoned by the player after constructing
a wizard's keep, Seven Kingdoms takes a different view. The first step
to summoning a supernatural being is to obtain the proper scroll. To do that,
you must battle a lair of Frythans (about 50), the boogie men of Seven Kingdoms.
Next, you must construct a temple using that scroll. Each scroll has a specific
ethnicity, and can only construct a temple of that ethnicity (no integration
in this game). You must then staff that temple with worshipers of the correct
ethnicity. After what seems like an eternity of prayer, you are able to summon
a god-like figure of that particular culture to do your bidding for a limited
time. The gods are very powerful and add to the fun of Seven Kingdoms,
but they are a very scarce resource.

The espionage model of Seven Kingdoms is very well
designed. You can train a spy and send him to settle in an
enemy village. He can then wait and gain experience, or begin to
decrease the loyalty of the townspeople. Your spy may also be drafted
into the enemy's military. Once inside a fort, he can try to
bribe other soldiers, who then become spies. Your spy may even
bribe the fort's general, or, failing that, assassinate him.
The computer makes good use of spies as well. There is little
worse than finding out that a general in an important fort has
been bribed, so it becomes important to keep your troops' loyalty
high by giving them periodic 'honors' (cash bonuses).

Seven Kingdoms is very similar to Warcraft
II. Unfortunately, in the 'borrowing', the designers forgot to add a good
variety of units, or interaction with the environment, such as trees and animals.
Despite some comparisons to Civilization on the box, Seven Kingdoms
is nowhere near as complex. As if to compensate for the dearth of unit choices,
the supernatural being/god component helps spice up the battles from time to
time. The excellent espionage system makes Seven Kingdoms very entertaining
for multiplayer, but for a single player game, I'd recommend either Warcraft
II or Age
of Empires.